Tech Bitch

Cancer Research UK has launched its first ever science podcast competition today, giving teenagers across the UK the chance to air their views about a range of hot topics. The top three podcasts will be featured on the charity’s Web site, as well as winning their creators one of three fantastic prizes.

Launched ahead of the Easter holidays, the science podcast competition marks the start of National Science and Engineering Week (7 to 16 March). SciencePod challenges students aged 14 to 16 to explore controversial issues in health and science and create a short podcast about the impact they have on people’s lives.

Students can choose between four topics: ‘Should under 18s be allowed to use sunbeds?’; ‘Is the cervical cancer vaccine a good idea?’; ‘Should smoking be totally banned?’ and ‘Diet and cancer: does it matter what we eat?’

Entries will be judged by a panel of expert podcasters, including BBC Radio One drivetime presenter, DJ Scott Mills, The Guardian’s science journalist, Alok Jha, and Cancer Research UK’s Dr Kat Arney, who presents the charity’s monthly podcast.

The competition is open to GCSE students and links in with the Science, English, Media and Citizenship curricula. To find out how to take part, visit Sciencepod.org.uk. The closing date is 30 April, making the Easter holidays the perfect time for teens to research and record their podcasts.

The competition reflects the increase in the use of podcasting as a method of communicating science in schools, by scientific research organisations and the media. By encouraging students to develop the creative and technical skills necessary to take part, Cancer Research UK is helping to equip future scientists and journalists with new techniques to communicate their work.

A database containing more than 8700 harvested FTP account credentials, including username, password and server address has been uncovered. These stolen credentials enable criminals to compromise servers and automatically inject crimeware to infect users visiting them. We’re all gonna die!

Among those stolen accounts are those of Fortune-level global companies in a wide range of industries including manufacturing, telecom, media, online retail, IT, as well as government agencies. The stolen FTP accounts include some of the world’s top 100 domains as ranked by Alexa.com.

The plot thickens. Details have emerged of the workings of an insidious new application, especially designed to abuse and trade stolen FTP account credentials of legitimate companies around the world. A trading interface is used to qualify the stolen accounts in terms of country of residence of the FTP server and Google page ranking of the compromised server.

This information enables cunning cybercriminals to devise cost for the compromised FTP credentials for resale to other cybercriminals or to adjust the attack on more prominent sites. The trading application also allows the cybercriminal to manage FTP credential information to automatically inject IFRAME tags to Web pages on the compromised server.

Software-as-a-Service has been evolving for sometime, but until now, it has been applied only to legitimate applications. With this new trading application, cybercriminals have an instant ‘solution’ to their ‘problem’ of gaining access to FTP credentials and thus infecting both the legitimate Web sites and its unsuspecting visitors. All of this can be easily achieved with just one push of a button.

A new Web site has landed aimed at encouraging more women into employment in the science, engineering and technology (SET) sectors.

The Web site for the Bradford-based UK Resource Centre for Women in Science Engineering and Technology (UKRC) aims to bring more women into areas of the workplace that have traditionally been the preserve of men. Apparently, half a million women in the UK are qualified in either science, engineering or technology - but less than a third work in these sectors, all of which are suffering a severe skills shortage. If you’re interested, all of these women are single …

Men with clipboards say skills in the SET sector are expected to decline further over the next ten years which could seriously damage the UK’s productivity and competitiveness.

The UKRC, through its Web site, plans to single-handily tackle the low numbers of women working in science, engineering and technology by providing a central source of expertise, data and information to encourage more women to geek-up. The site also provides a mentoring service, should any of the candidates break a nail …